Archives for 2011

CCARE’s Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT) is an eight-week course designed to develop the qualities of compassion, empathy, and kindness for oneself and for others. CCT integrates traditional contemplative practices with contemporary psychology and scientific research on compassion. The program was developed at Stanford University by a team of contemplative scholars, clinical psychologists, and researchers.

CCT is designed to support anyone who wants to cultivate compassion for themselves and for others. This includes parents, caregivers, educators, healthcare professionals, therapists, executives, public servants, and people in a wide range of professions and life contexts. No previous meditation experience is required, although willingness to practice daily meditation is a key component of the training.

Disclaimer: Stanford Compassion Cultivation Training courses are educational and are not meant to treat psychological disorders. Refunds (minus a $75 dollar processing fee) will only be issued up until 48 hours before the first class session. Participation in the course requires regular attendance and adhering to basic classroom policies; participants who miss more than two classes or otherwise disrupt the learning environment may be asked to withdraw from the course without a refund.

Imagine this: you walk into the laboratory, and are a shown a series of 20-second video clips. In each clip, a different person is listening to someone else speaking. You can’t hear what the speaker is saying; there is no sound to the clip. But you’re told that the speaker is talking about a time when he or she suffered.

The researchers ask you to rate how compassionate the listener is, just by what you can see: his or her body language and facial expressions.

This study was conducted by psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, who found that people agreed on who was a compassionate listener. The participants all seemed to rely on the same cues to assess compassion: more open body language, eye contact, head nods, and smiling.

I was excited to see this finding because I teach compassionate listening as a skill in the Stanford Compassion Training. Students in the training learn to deliberately do exactly what the participants in this study were using to assess compassion.

The first step is what I call “listening with the whole body.” This means literally tuning in to the person who is speaking. “Compassionate” body language includes:

The Dalai Lama has been telling us for years that it would make us happy, but he never said it would make us healthy, too.

“If you want others to be happy,” reads the first part of his famous formula, “practice compassion.” Then comes the second part of the prescription: “If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”

Maybe the Dalai Lama knew all along or maybe he’s just finding out like the rest of us, but science is starting to catch up with a couple millennia of Buddhist thought. In recent years, the investigation of compassion has moved beyond theology and philosophy to embrace a wide range of scientific fields, including neurology, endocrinology and immunology. And while the benefits of being the recipient of compassion are obvious, new research shows that the practice of compassion has beneficial effects not only on mental health but on physical health, too.

Which is good news for everyone on the planet, as you can never have too much compassion. Job layoffs and home foreclosures, the cultural erasure of Tibet and the abscess that is Gaza, the sorrows of disease, natural disasters and death that are always with us: To create a short list makes one guilty of omission. Despite all the progress and advances we have made, there is still plenty about which to feel compassion.

On Sept. 8th and 9th, a diverse group of some of the nations leading thinkers from science, religion, arts, and business, will gather in N.Y. around the 10th anniversary of 9-11 to reflect on a new way forward, by sharing their wisdom through traditional stories both sacred and secular, and scientific discovery, to develop a shared narrative to help reweave the fabric of our society.

To highlight the gathering, a unique public program, Searching for Answers and Wisdom in a Post-9/11 World, will be held will be held at 8:15 to 9:30 p.m., Sept. 8th, 2011, at the 92nd Street Y in NYC. Moderated by Emmy Award winner Arthur R. Miller, and based on the Fred Friendly seminars engaging the audience. The event will include such panelists as: Dr. Stuart A. Kaufman, a MacArthur Prize winner and author of Reinventing the Sacred; Prof. R. Gustav Niebuhr, Dir. of the Religion and Society Program at Syracuse Univ. and former New York Times correspondent; Dr. Naresh Singh, world’s leading authority and advocate for Sustainable Livelihoods for the poor; Asma Uddin, prominent attorney and founder and editor-in-chief of altmuslimah.com; Diane Schenandoah, a renowned Native American artist; and Iya Amiebelle Olatunji, African American Matriarch and mentor.

You’re invited to watch the live webcast of TEDxGoldenGateED on Saturday, June 11th from 1:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) in the United States. An incredibly diverse and impressive field of speakers will tell us about the new science of compassion. We’ll also see how compassion helps transform schools and communities.

Cheaper than a massage, and fewer side effects than popping pills: A new study reports that crossing your arms can significantly relieve pain.

Twenty brave participants (12 of them women) allowed scientists to inflict pain via pulses of radiant heat from an infrared laser. The laser was aimed at the sensitive radial nerve of the forearm. During some bursts of pain, participants had their arms crossed in front of them. In those trials, participants reported significantly reduced sensations of pain. Researchers also were monitoring brain activity with an EEG. During arms-crossed trials, the participants’ brains showed smaller spikes of activity suggesting pain processing.

The research team, led by neuroscientist Giandomenico Iannetti from University College London, UK, speculates that crossing the arms confuses the brain. The researchers write, “Crossing the hands over the body midline impairs [the brain’s] ability to localize tactile stimuli.” More specifically, information about the right side of the body appears to be coming in through the nervous system from the left side of the body, and vice/versa. The fact that participants could see their own hands added to the brain’s confusion – because it looked like the right hand was the left hand, and vice/versa.

Compassion is defined as the embodiment and recognition of another person’s suffering coupled with a sincere desire to alleviate that suffering. Every one of us has suffered, is suffering or will, at some point, suffer. It has been stated many times that survival is of the fittest, but when one reads Darwin closely this is not the case. Rather, the more accurate statement, coined by Dacher Keltner, Ph.D. and other leading social scientists, is “the survival of the kindest.” Paul Ekman, Ph.D., a leading expert on emotion describes an ever expanding body of scientific evidence that being compassionate affords significant benefit to oneself and society in his recent article in JAMA. In addition to evidence that survival may be enhanced by caring for others, there are now findings suggesting that the statement made by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, “if one wishes to make others happy be compassionate, if one wishes to be happy be compassionate,” in fact, has great validity.

But happiness alone is not the only benefit of being compassionate. In a number of studies using a variety of psychological and biological measures and neuroimaging techniques, compassion not only stimulates one’s pleasure (reward) centers but also leads to a decrease in biological markers of stress and an increase in indices of adaptive immune function. The other extraordinary finding is that though our capacity to be compassionate is, in part, controlled by our genes, the work at our center, The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford, (and a number of other centers) is demonstrating that compassion can be trained. In fact, this compassion training is based on practices by a number of contemplative traditions that have been practiced over 2500 years.

So what’s not to like about being compassionate? It improves survival of the species, leads to happiness and results in improved health. The reality is that while science and technology have the potential to offer incredible benefit, it is the simple interventions known to us for thousands of years that can have a profound effect on the lives of individuals and society. It is the humility of a number of scientists who had the courage to explore these ancient traditions who have created the powerful validated techniques to improve the health and happiness of those struggling with our modern, non-compassion-promoting society.

This is the third in a series of essays exploring the relationship between religion and science. This series is an outgrowth of the Sages and Scientists Symposium sponsored by the Chopra Foundation.

The number one most emailed article on the New York Times, at the time I’m writing this, is a blog post by Tara Parker-Pope on the importance of self-compassion for making a change such as losing weight or quitting smoking.

It is striking that the article is the most emailed — clearly it strikes a chord among the typical self-critical, stressed out reader — but also is followed by an avalance of negative comments, saying things like: “Oh good grief! Americans think so highly of themselves as it is. Really there shouldn’t be more encouragement, ” and ” if we don’t hold ourselves to high performance standards, how can we, ethically and morally, expect others to meet those standards?” These comments reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of what self-compassion is, how it contributes to (not undermines) self-accountability, and how it differs from self-esteem.

I recently gave a 15-minute talk at the Stanford Happiness Conference about the importance of self-compassion and the research on how it helps us maintain — not abandon — our standards and succeed at our goals, as well as increase happiness and decrease depression. Watch it here.